Frederic R. Hopp

Leibniz Institute for Psychology (ZPID) | ZPID

Valid and reliable measurement of media and communication exposure is crucial for communication science, psychology, political science, sociology, pedagogy, economics, and law, and the practitioners in media, communication, and information. At the same time, this is a wicked problem for which there are no simple solutions. That was never the case,...

Moral appeals – references to morally right and wrong principles – are strategically employed in a wide range of political communication. Given their affective and motivational relevance, moral appeals have become salient frames for mobilizing and persuading voters, but are also associated with political polarization and violence. Understanding how...

Moral judgments are shaped by socialization and cultural heritage. Understanding how moral considerations vary across the globe requires the systematic development of moral stimuli for use in different cultures and languages. Focusing on Dutch populations, we adapted and validated two recent instruments for examining moral judgments: (1) the Moral...

This chapter explores the extent to which policy statements on International Relations are moralized by both populist and non-populist parties. We do so by performing an automated content analysis on manifesto data from 22 elections in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom (using the Comparative Manifestos Project—CMP; n = 215,6...

Media exposure is an inherently dynamic process. Whether we are watching TV, listening to music, or scrolling through the latest news feed, our brains continuously parse incoming sensory information into coherent, interconnected, and meaningful units. Notably, these complex computational transformations often appear intuitively and without consciou...

This book discusses the conditions under which stories we view on screens—movies, streamed series, and television—can lead to moral understanding in viewers. Moral understanding goes beyond moral knowledge; it is a complex cognitive achievement that may consist of the ability to understand why, to ask the right questions, to categorize, to apply ge...

Moral judgments are shaped by socialization and cultural heritage. Understanding how moral considerations vary across the globe requires the systematic development of moral stimuli for use in different cultures and languages. Focusing on Dutch populations, we adapted and validated two recent instruments for examining moral judgments: 1) the Moral F...

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a highly prevalent neurodevelopmental disorder associated with suboptimal outcomes throughout the lifespan. Extant work suggests that ADHD-related deficits in task performance may be magnified under high cognitive load and minimized under high perceptual load, but these effects have yet to be syste...

Moral foundations theory (MFT) holds that moral judgements are driven by modular and ideologically variable moral foundations but where and how these foundations are represented in the brain and shaped by political beliefs remains an open question. Using a moral vignette judgement task (n = 64), we probed the neural (dis)unity of moral foundations....

This book discusses the conditions under which stories we view on screens—movies, streamed series, and television—can lead to moral understanding in viewers. Moral understanding goes beyond moral knowledge; it is a complex cognitive achievement that may consist of the ability to understand why, to ask the right questions, to categorize, to apply ge...

The present research examined how value-free and value-driven measures of argument strength (MAS) can be computationally extracted using a theory-driven approach at scale in a naturalistic setting by analyzing a total of 7,961 real-world debates and 42,716 judgments in rhetorical quality. In the first study, value-free MAS was significantly related...

When people feel socially threatened and excluded, they could use their mobile phones to reconnect with others and feel better. We assumed that such positive results can occur even if mobile phones are not actively used. Rather, it may suffice if users believe that carrying a mobile phone ensures social connection. This mindset may help users recov...

Highlights  Smartphones as physical devices and symbols represent social bonds and affiliation  Beyond mere use, they can help users deal with feeling ostracized  With smartphones in the pocket, users felt less socially threatened than without  Social app cues reduced feeling ostracized better than information app cues  Social app cues reduced...

Paying attention to media requires continuously selecting and processing relevant information while filtering out numerous competing stimuli. Although the factors that drive attention toward or away from a single media task are relatively well characterized, there is a lack of understanding regarding how attention to media functions in the presence...

Morality plays an important role in culture, identity, and emotion. Recent advances in natural language processing have shown that it is possible to classify moral values expressed in text at scale. Morality classification relies on human annotators to label the moral expressions in text, which provides training data to achieve state-of-the-art per...

Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) holds that moral judgments are driven by modular and ideologically variable moral foundations, but where and how they are represented in the brain and shaped by political beliefs remains an open question. Using a moral judgment task of moral foundation vignettes, we probed the neural (dis)unity of moral foundations. U...

Media multitasking has become nearly ubiquitous in the developed world. Higher self-reported media multitasking has consistently been shown to relate to self-reported attention problems, including symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but the magnitude of this relationship is small and heterogeneous across studies. These find...

The “replication crisis” in neuroscientific research has led to calls for improving reproducibility. In traditional neuroscience analyses, irreproducibility may occur as a result of issues across various stages of the methodological process. For example, different operating systems, different software packages, and even different versions of the sa...

Successful media processing requires that an individual attend to relevant information embedded among numerous competing stimuli. In communication research, this process is often referred to as resource allocation. Although the factors that drive individuals to allocate resources toward or away from a single message are relatively well characterize...

In the Hollywood film industry, racial minorities remain underrepresented. Characters from racially underrepresented groups receive less screen time, fewer central story positions, and frequently inherit plotlines, motivations, and actions that are primarily driven by White characters. Currently, there are no clearly defined, standardized, and scal...

While there is substantial research on COVID-19’s general framing in the news, little is known about the antecedents and moderators of using moral language in communicating the disease to audiences. In this study, we rely on the Model of Intuitive Morality and Exemplars to explore how news media’s attention on COVID-19 and moralizing language in CO...

Moral intuitions play a central role in communication processes, from the selection, valuation, and production of media content to political campaigning, opinion formation, and voting. The valid extraction of moral information from media content is a critical step toward understanding the dynamic transactions between moral frames and real-world eve...

We herein discuss our commentary in light of Wang and Liu’s response and clarify our suggestions regarding their original content analysis. Revisiting the methodological decisions that impact the reliability and validity of moral content codings, we focus on the selection and separation of coding and context units, the importance of keeping the ann...

This study examines how exposure to serial audiovisual narratives is associated with media users’ empathy. While mounting evidence suggests enhanced empathy following exposure to written, fictional narratives, the present study expands this line of research to the context of fictional serial audiovisual narratives. Considering that social interacti...

This handbook provides a strong collection of communication- and psychology-based theories and models on media entertainment, which can be used as a knowledge resource for any academic and applied purpose. Its 41 chapters offer explanations of entertainment that audiences find in any kind of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media, from classic novels to VR video ga...

The increasing adoption of brain imaging methods has greatly augmented our understanding of the neural underpinnings of communication processes. Enabled by recent advancements in mathematics and computational infrastructure, researchers have begun to move beyond traditional univariate analytic techniques in favor of methods that consider the brain...

The increasing adoption of brain imaging methods has greatly augmented our understanding of the neural underpinnings of communication processes. Enabled by recent advancements in mathematics and computational infrastructure, researchers have begun to move beyond traditional univariate analytic techniques in favor of methods that consider the brain...

Moral conflict is central to appealing narratives, but no methodology exists for computationally extracting moral conflict from narratives at scale. In this article, we present an approach combining tools from social network analysis and natural language processing with recent theoretical advancements in the Model of Intuitive Morality and Exemplar...

Moral conflict is central to appealing narratives, but no methodology exists for computationally extracting moral conflict from narratives at scale. In this article, we present an approach combining tools from social network analysis and natural language processing with recent theoretical advancements in the Model of Intuitive Morality and Exemplar...

Moral intuitions are a central motivator in human behavior. Recent work highlights the importance of moral intuitions for understanding a wide range of issues ranging from online radicalization to vaccine hesitancy. Extracting and analyzing moral content in messages, narratives, and other forms of public discourse is a critical step toward understa...

Moral intuitions are a central motivator in human behavior. Recent work highlights the importance of moral intuitions for understanding a wide range of issues ranging from online radicalization to vaccine hesitancy. Extracting and analyzing moral content in messages, narratives, and other forms of public discourse is a critical step toward understa...

A central goal of news research is to understand the interplay between news coverage and sociopolitical events. Although a great deal of work has elucidated how events drive news coverage, and how in turn news coverage influences societal outcomes, integrative systems-level models of the reciprocal interchanges between these two processes are spars...

Digital media are sensory-rich, multimodal, and often highly interactive. An extensive collection of theories and models within the field of media psychology assume the multimodal nature of media stimuli, yet there is current ambiguity as to the independent contributions of visual and auditory content to message complexity and to resource availabili...

Digital media are sensory-rich, multimodal, and often highly interactive. An extensive collection of theories and models within the field of media psychology assume the multimodal nature of media stimuli, yet there is current ambiguity as to the independent contributions of visual and auditory content to message complexity and to resource availabil...

This article introduces the interface for communication research (iCoRe) to access, explore, and analyze the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT; Leetaru & Schrodt, 2013). GDELT provides a vast, open source, and continuously updated repository of online news and event metadata collected from tens of thousands of news outlets around...

This article introduces the interface for communication research (iCoRe) to access, explore, and analyze the Global Database of Events, Language and Tone (GDELT; Leetaru & Schrodt, 2013). GDELT provides a vast, open source, and continuously updated repository of online news and event metadata collected from tens of thousands of news outlets around...

This article introduces the interface for communication research (iCoRe) to access, explore, and analyze the Global Database of Events, Language and Tone (GDELT; Leetaru & Schrodt, 2013). GDELT provides a vast, open source, and continuously updated repository of online news and event metadata collected from tens of thousands of news outlets around...

Mounting evidence suggests that humans are equipped with a neural monitoring system that yields an intuitive pleasure response when socially normative (moral) behaviors are observed and displeasure when non-normative (immoral) behaviors are observed (Tooby et al., 2005). Moral Foundations Theory (Graham et al., 2013; Greene et al., 2001) indicates...

The purpose of this study is to examine how news frames and events are intertwined in a reciprocal influence process. While communication scholarship has invested great efforts in how particular events such as terror attacks or protests are framed by news organizations, no research has examined how certain news frames following certain event types...

Two studies were conducted to test the relation between hedonic and eudaimonic entertainment experiences as well as their respective influence on information processing while watching a political talk show on TV. Assumptions from entertainment theory and positive psychology served as theoretical basis. A curvilinear relationship between hedonic and...

An increasing number of studies has been utilizing the Moral Foundations Dictionary (MFD; Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009) to extract moral information from textual data. Yet, the MFD inherits certain limitations such as ad hoc pre-selection and overlappings of word stems that limit its validity. In this paper, we introduce a crowd-sourced approach fo...

Within the media psychology literature, a clear pattern has emerged wherein certain media use patterns, such as self-reported media multitasking, are associated with greater self-reported difficulty in task-switching, inhibition of irrelevant distractors, and reduced cognitive control. Interestingly, though, this relationship is not clearly support...

In this paper, we introduce a novel method for analyzing entity framing in a large corpus of online news articles. This measure is proposed as a solution to the heretofore intractable problem of large-scale analysis of framing for particular entities within corpora too large to be reliably hand-coded and for which no document selection procedures h...

Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) and the Model of Intuitive Morality and Exemplars (MIME) contend that moral judgments are built on a universal set of basic moral intuitions. A large body of research has supported many of MFT’s and the MIME’s central hypotheses. Yet, an important prerequisite of this research—the ability to extract latent moral conte...

In this paper, we introduce the Moral Narrative Analyzer for Movies (MoNA-M), a web-based, hybrid content-analytical platform that combines automated and human content codings to extract moral content from popular film scripts. We present a computational pipeline that parses film scripts in both PDF, as well as text format, and subsequently extract...

Brain imaging techniques within communication research have rapidly expanded in popularity in recent years, driven by an increase in access to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology and by theoretical developments within the field. In this manuscript, we present an overview of research from within communication and cognate discipli...

Drawing on the affect infusion model and on affective disposition theory, this study aims to explain the influence of viewers’ affective disposition toward the guests of political TV talk shows on their information processing and judgments. The affective disposition was manipulated in an experiment. Results suggest that this affective disposition r...

In times of being always online and connected, cyberostracism—the feeling of being ignored or excluded over the Internet—is a serious threat to fundamental human needs: belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaningful existence. According to the temporal need-threat model, responses to ostracism lead to immediate and universal experiences of negativ...

In this paper, we introduce a novel, computational approach to the analysis of online news data using the Global Database of Events, Language and Tone (GDELT; Leetaru & Schrodt, 2013), a vast, constantly updated repository of metadata collected from tens of thousands of news sources around the world. As this database has yet been untapped by commun...

While the Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) has received increased attention in explaining social media engagement, the effects of FoMO on self-determined motivations to use the Internet remain unknown. Drawing on self-determination theory, the aim of this study was to examine the impact of extrinsic motivation in the form of FoMO on perceived online need...

This study's purpose is twofold: to introduce a new format into existing political entertainment research (‘serious’ political talk shows) and to establish a more specific definition of entertainment in a political context. To do so, the authors rely on a two-process-model of entertainment experiences. A telephone survey (N = 230) was conducted to...